Blog

Back By Popular Demand: 2 New Lenses – Classic and Reporter

You’ve asked for them, and have been patient with the waiting! We are super happy to finally announce that we’ve just released the two most asked for Lenses since the launch of SlideDeck 2. Each Lens brings something new to the table, and allows for an even finer level of customization. These Lenses were inspired by their original skins from SlideDeck 1, but both have been rebuilt from the ground up and made better than ever. Keep reading for more information on each Lens, some examples and their features.

Reporter (inspired by Smart SlideDeck Light/Dark) – available in all SlideDeck 2 for WordPress tiers(Lite, Personal, Professional, and Developer) as a Dynamic Source Lens.

Let’s take a look at each lens in more detail.

Classic:

Inspired by the original spined Lens (the one with vertical bars)

Original SlideDeck 1 Classic Skin

By far the most requested Lens addition, the Classic Lens takes the original spined Classic SlideDeck skin and takes it to the next level. We’ve added a robust set of options to this Lens that give you more control.

You can now change the width of the spines by adjusting a slider, and through fancy color pickers, choose the default and active colors for the Spines(vertical bars) and Spine text independently. This is pretty awesome as it it lets you, on the fly, adjust the look of the Classic Lens to fit your site design and color scheme better than ever.

Spine titles will inherit the title font chosen for the content and can even be turned off if they are not desired. We’re excited to release this Lens, and are hopeful that you are equally excited to use it!

All SlideDeck Lenses come with a bunch of customization options, but Classic brings along a whole set of features unique to its design:

Choose custom colors (with color picker) for:

default Spines

active Spines

default Spine titles

active Spine titles

Spine title length

Spine width

Turn Spine titles on/off

Set indices to:

off/hidden

numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…

upper-case roman numeral: I, II, III, IV, V…

lower-case roman numeral: i, ii, iii, iv, v…

upper-case alphabetical: A, B, C, D, E…

lower-case alphabetical: a, b, c, d, e…

Custom Content Decks can set custom Spine titles

Reporter:

Inspired by the original Smart SlideDeck skin from SlideDeck 1 for WordPress

Original Smart SlideDeck Skin

With the Reporter Lens, we wanted to take the original Smart SlideDeck skin and expand on it. We wanted to be sure we were improving the Lens and not just porting it over.

With the Reporter Lens, images and text are given equal priority, as opposed to our other Lenses which incorporate images as a main design element. Reporter also shows images in their original aspect ratio, with no cropping, an option we are eventually looking to translate to other Lenses too.

This new Lens also features fancy navigation – including Titles, Dots, Dates (which can be toggled between 5 date formats) and additional slide detection to allow for a paginated navigation. This gives you the option to use many slides and maintain a beautiful navigation design that is functional and intuitive.

Behind the Scenes: Challenges We Encountered

Each of these Lenses presented their own challenges, which lead to these being awesome Lenses that we’re proud of. Read on below to learn about some of the challenges we overcame to bring you the Lenses you love:

Classic

Giving you more – We wanted to be sure that we were not just creating a SlideDeck 2 Lens with spines, and essentially just copying over the same style as the original. We are all about making things better and so we wanted to give you more control over the style/colors of the SlideDeck. The additions of the custom colors and spine width adjustments forced some core changes and additional logic to be added to the plugin.

Reintroducing Spines – In SlideDeck 2 we took a step away from the traditional spined Lens. All of our Lenses to date have not taken advantage of this style. But after plenty of user feedback, we knew we needed to bring these back with a Lens. This required us to create some additional filters for handling the build of the deck and hook into it in a way that gave us the control and output we needed to achieve these changes. This also now allows for you to create your own spined Lenses and hook into the filters we created to help further customize your custom Lenses.(documentation to come)

Custom colors for spine and text variants – We wanted to give you the ability to choose your own spine colors from within the admin, without the need to write CSS or apply your own styles. We adapted the accent-color logic to create new options for these elements. Background images for custom spines would still need to be taken care of on a CSS level and is a more advanced technique. We may consider looking into some method of incorporating this into the admin, but it presents a whole new set of challenges and may actually hurt the design and use for the Lens..

Spine width – The spine element can take up a lot of real-estate, and we wanted to make it much easier to adjust the width, instead of needing to modify the CSS of the Lens. With a little slider, and AJAX update in the admin preview, you can now set the width of the spines on the fly.

Reporter Challenges

Resizing of the images – With the SlideDeck 1 PRO version of the Lens we had to be rigid with the way we sized the images. But with SlideDeck 2 our skill set has grown and the plugin has changed immensely, we have gotten the image to be flexible while maintaining correct proportions. Our other Lenses always try to use the image as a design element, large background of the slide, but this Lens lets the text and image have equal priority and lets the image maintain it original aspect ratio with no cropping taking place.

Pagination of the titles and dates – This is not something that we have had to do before. In the original SlideDeck 1 PRO Smart SlideDeck skin, the number of slides was limited depending on the navigation type used. This was not something we felt was appropriate to do, and with so many slides this was tricky. We had to come up with an intuitive way to control the navigation elements, but still scale the size to be appropriate for the content displayed.

Want to make your own?

Interested in taking SlideDeck 2 for a test drive and trying these new Lenses out? Try our Free Live Demo

Featured Posts

Do you want to showcase your WordPress custom posts in the slider of your website? A WordPress post slider will not improve traffic for your blog posts, but will also improve the visitor engagement with...

Showcasing images from any Pinterest account was never so easy. SlideDeck3 gives you the ability to create a dynamic Pinterest slider in WordPress in just 30 seconds. Also, enables you to allow visitors to pin your slider’s...

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms today. How about if you could showcase your favorite Instagram photos into the slider of your WordPress site? While there are many WordPress plugins available,...

Do you want to boost your sales ? Sliders can be used for marketing and highlighting the hot products on your site. Using the WooCommerce Product Slider to showcase your hot products is an efficient...

Do you want to quickly create image/video/text/HTML slides in WordPress? SlideDeck3 allow you to mix a variety of slide types into a single presentation such as photos, videos, text and HTML documents to create a...

Do you want to add a Zenfolio Gallery slider to your website? You can easily import the gallery images from your Zenfolio account and create a beautiful responsive slider for your WordPress site using SlideDeck3....

Comments
(22) Responses

Steph Calvert

Hey there! What I’d love to see is a way to use the classic lens without any text – so it’s just spines that show a hint of the image. Is there a way to shut off the black or white spine so just the slide image underneath shows?

Dave

Hi Candice, we don’t really answer support questions in blog post comments and the answer to this one is more appropriately handled through our support system. Please make a support request through our support system at http://dtelepathy.zendesk.com/ Thanks!

Candice

I love the classic lens, but would like to change the colors of the text and background that cover part of the image. I would love to have a white background with black text, and I’m sure that I can probably change it in a .css file. Would you mind directing me to the file I should look at?

SiteSubscribe

Michael Sandstrom

Thanks for your response. As mentioned, we are in urgent need of the vertical/horizontal Slidedeck for our web functionality/content management as a broadcaster. We understand that you are working on developing this functionality in your new Slide deck 2. Meanwhile, would it be possible for you to release the old Slidedeck Pro version to us (or point us to a safe place to download Slidedeck Pro), which has the vertical/horizontal functionality until the new development is ready.

Michael Sandstrom (CIAM Media)

Michael Sandstrom (CIAM Media)

We are very thankful that you have taken this crucial step to implement these two sliders again. The improvement you have made are really excellent, and much appreciated.

The Classic application is especially crucial for us as a broadcaster. We have about 60 programs, that fits into 5-6 categories. Each program is uploading new content daily over RSS feeds. However, to accommodate all of these programs we would require the the capacity to cross vertically under each category.

It would be absolutely fantastic if you could implement vertical functionality is the Classic Slider. Thanks for your creative and encouraging R&D and support.

Jason

Thanks for the feedback Michael! Yes, we’ve absolutely been looking at potential ways to reintroduce the vertical sliding functionality in the Classic Lens, so keep ’em peeled – there are definitely a lot of potential use-cases for this kind of interaction.

Brendan Rohan

Hi guys.
Excellent work. But I do have to make one minor comment. What makes me nervous about employing slide deck 2 on my website is what I call ‘developer anxiety’. It’s when developers keep changing and keep trying to improve functions and graphic styles that were already great. For example, i would have been perfectly happy with a direct port of your 2 old lens styles. If you’ve done your best work, leave it alone!

Just a thought. Keep up the great work.
Brendan Rohan – Melbourne, Australia.

Jamie

Great insight Brendan,
However I’ll be the first to say that we’re always growing and learning. My colleague Dave (who is a more skilled developer than myself) developed the first version of “Reporter” (then simply called Light and Dark) for SlideDeck 1. When he created them, we thought they were amazing.

After being in the wild, appearing on multiple sites and being subjected to different sized images, different content, and other hardships, we realized that the original version had its shortcomings. Fast-forward to a few years later, and the Reporter lens has been rebuilt (by me) from the ground up with newer techniques, and it’s much more solid. I use it on my own personal site and it now scales to virtually any size you author it at. The basic idea is that we tried to keep the look, feel, and soul of the designs while making them more robust and configurable.

The “Classic” lens is essentially very similar to the first SlideDeck design, but one of the most common requests we got was for users to be able to easily configure the slide spine colors.

I know it can feel like SlideDeck is a living design, but it’s only that way due to our desire to make it better, every time, better than that last one.

Chad

I’m very glad to see the return of spines! I did resurrect them with a custom lens with a bit of help from your support team, but it was a lot of work and it did not offer the new hooks and control that you’ve now built into SD2. It really seemed more like a hack than a fully featured lens. Having this new lens option out of the box will help speed my workflow greatly and allow me to offer an even better slideshow product to my clients. Thanks!

Richard

Very happy to see the classic lens make a return and to be able to customise the colours is awesome. Will it be possible to change the colour of the background on the text style – I’d like a plain white background but you only seem to be able to use the default black?

Jason

Thanks Richard – yeah, we’re super-psyched to bring these popular lenses back! =) To answer your question, currently, no, there’s no option for the content background color, but we could definitely look into that, if it’s something a lot of people need. In the meantime, you can override the background color with a little custom CSS in your theme.